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Screen Two: Hotel du Lac (1986)
Better than the Book
Edith Hope, a middle-aged romantic novelist, goes to stay in a lakeside hotel in Switzerland. We are given to understand that she has been "banished" from England by her friends after some social indiscretion, and later learn that this indiscretion was an abortive wedding in which she jilted her fiancé, Geoffrey, at the last minute. Edith's private life is clearly a complex one, because while engaged to Geoffrey she was also carrying on a secret affair with a married man, David, an affair which is still continuing. (While staying at the hotel, Edith writes long letters to David, but never posts them).
White staying at the Hotel du Lac, Edith does not do very much apart from going for occasional walks or trips on the lake, which gives her time to observe the other guests, including Mrs Pusey, a wealthy English widow and her daughter Jennifer, Mme de Bonneuil, in exile from her chateau, now occupied by her son and daughter-in-law, and Monica, the wife of a diplomat attached to the EEC, who is on some sort of health cure. Eventually, Edith meets Mr Neville, a divorcee and successful businessman who proposes marriage to her, although this would be an "open" marriage which would allow both parties to take lovers.
"Hotel du Lac" formed part of the BBC's "Screen Two" series of television films. It was based upon a novel by Anita Brookner which had won the Booker Prize two years earlier. I read the novel after it achieved that success, but did not enjoy it. (Those were my salad days when I was green enough in judgement to assume that literary prizes were some sort of guarantee of good writing). The Edith of the book came across as a dull and prosaic individual, and not only did Brookner try to create a whole novel around so uninteresting a character, she also concentrated upon the least interesting part of Edith's story. The history of Edith's tangled relationships with David and Geoffrey could have supported a novel; the history of her stay at the hotel would have been dealt with better in a short story, and trying to stretch it out to novel length merely resulted in something bland and bloodless.
I did not, therefore, have any very high expectations of this film, but it turned out to be better than I had expected. I think that the reason was the Brookner's characters, often lifeless on the printed page, come to life in the hands of a gifted cast. This is particularly true of Anna Massey as Edith and Denholm Elliott as Neville, but there are also good contributions from Barry Foster as David (seen in a series of flashbacks) and Julia Mackenzie as Jennifer, who initially seems very much under the thumb of her domineering mother, but who later reveals a rebellious side to her character. The film was also mercifully free of some of the eccentricities of Brookner's prose style, such as when she describes Edith's hotel room as being "the colour of overcooked veal" or Monica as having "a face like a grebe? (I cannot imagine what a human with a face like a grebe would look like. Certainly not like the charming Patricia Hodge).
The film still suffers from some of the weaknesses of the book; we never, for example, learn why Edith decided at the last minute not to marry Geoffrey (or, for that matter, why she agreed to marry him in the first place). Overall, however, it is a well-made, understated TV movie. It reminded me of another film about the British abroad in a lakeside hotel, the 1995 adaptation of H. E. Bates's "A Month by the Lake". 7/10.
Margrete den første (2021)
Money Well Spent
In 1397 the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden agreed to form a union (known as the Kalmar Union, after the Swedish city where the union treaty was signed) to counter the threat of German attacks, particularly by the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Order. The king of the union was officially the young Erik of Pomerania, but the effective ruler was his great-aunt and adoptive mother Margaret I of Denmark who had played the leading role in creating the union. (I refer to her as Margaret, which is how she is normally known in Britain, although the Danish form "Margrete" is used even in the English-language title).
The film, however, is not set at the time of the creation of the Kalmar Union, but five years later. It dramatises one of the strangest events of Scandinavian history, the affair of the "False Olaf". (There are parallels with the various "False Dimitrys" in Russia and the pretenders Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck in England). In 1402 Margaret was trying to negotiate Erik's marriage to Princess Philippa, the daughter of King Henry IV of England, in order to cement a military and diplomatic alliance between England and the union. In that year, however, a man appeared claiming to be Margaret's own son, Olaf, who had died in 1387. This claim was political dynamite. If Olaf were indeed still alive, he rather than Erik would be the rightful King of Denmark and Norway. Many denounced the supposed "Olaf" as an impostor sponsored by the Germans as part of a plot to undermine the union and the proposed alliance with England, whereas some, especially in Norway, accepted his claims.
Historians agree that the False Olaf, who was unable to speak a word of Danish, was indeed an impostor; he eventually admitted his imposture and was executed for treason. In the film, however, things are not so clear-cut. The man can indeed speak Danish, albeit imperfectly, and attributes the imperfections to his long years spent abroad. When Margaret is asked whether the man is her son, she simply replies "my son is dead", but later begins to have doubts. Has she recognised him as her long-lost son? Or has she deluded herself, desperately wanting to believe against all the evidence that her son may be alive? Whatever the truth, she acknowledges him as the rightful heir, much to Erik's fury, thus raising the real possibility that the union may collapse in civil war.
The film-makers could, had they wished, have made a film which followed the standard historical line that the False Olaf was indeed false. By exploring the possibility that he may have been genuine, they recognised that there are situations where ambiguity is artistically more satisfying than clarity, and this is one of them. This is a risky approach, because it makes greater demands from the actors, but fortunately they are equal to the task.
There are particularly fine contributions from Trine Dyrholm as Margaret, part grieving mother and part practitioner of a cynical Realpolitik, and from Jakob Oftebro as "The Man from Graudenz", as he is billed in the cast list. This billing, as does Oftebro's subtle interpretation of the role, leaves open the possibility that the man may have been the real Olaf, without ever excluding the possibility that he was just a nonentity from Graudenz (today in Poland but then in Prussia) who had been carefully coached in his role by his puppet-masters. Another good performance comes from Morten Hee Andersen as Erik, a rather spoilt and arrogant young man who suddenly sees his prospects threatened by the sudden appearance of the False Olaf.
Although the action takes place in the royal courts of Scandinavia, the visual look of the film is dark, possibly deliberately so to reflect the dark, tragic nature of its plot, and lacks the bright colours and pageantry found in many Hollywood films set in the Middle Ages. It was, however, made on a grand scale, and currently holds the record for the most expensive Danish feature film. With a stark story powerfully told and some excellent acting, I would say that the money was well spent. 8/10.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)
No Art to Find the Mind's Construction in the Face
Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy is regarded as one of America's most prolific serial killers, but he was only ever convicted of two murders, those of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, students at Florida State University. He was also convicted of three attempted murders, also of students at that university, and of a kidnapping in Utah, and was charged with another murder in Colorado, but escaped from the courthouse before his trial had finished. It was while he was on the run from Colorado that he committed the Florida murders. Bundy was eventually executed in the electric chair in 1989, but a few days before his execution he confessed to over 30 more killings, all of young women and girls, in various states, mostly in the West. Right up until making this confession, however, he had protested his innocence of all the charges against him.
Bundy was in many ways very different from the average person's idea of a serial killer. He was highly intelligent, having studied psychology and law at university. He was also handsome and charismatic, and could come across as charming. (Or as Shakespeare put it, "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face"). Trials were given extensive coverage in the media and he attracted a large group of supporters, many of them women, who believed passionately in his innocence. During his Florida murder trial he married one of them, Carole Ann Boone.
"Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" is Hollywood's take on these events. (The title of the film was the presiding judge's comment on Bundy's crimes when sentencing him to death). It follows Bundy's career from his days as a young student in the late sixties up until his execution. It also places emphasis on two of the women in his life, Boone and his earlier girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer, here referred to as "Liz Kendall", a single mother whom he first met when he was a student in Seattle. Liz initially believes inTed's innocence until the evidence presented during his Florida trial, which she is following on television, makes her begin to have doubts. Carole Ann, by contrast, is infatuated with Ted and remains blindly loyal to him until the last.
The film does not really tell us any more about the case, factually speaking, than we have learned over the years from documentaries. Anyone watching this film will probably be familiar with the facts of the Bundy case, as I was, so there is little tension and his final conviction will come as no surprise. Moreover, the film does not answer several questions. Questions like "What motivated a man like Bundy, who could have had a brilliant legal career, to become a killer?" (Bundy conducted his own defence at trial and impressed observers by his legal knowledge and forensic skills). Or "Why did so many women take the side of a man who killed women?"
The reason why it fails to answer these questions is probably because they are unanswerable, or at least only answerable via a psychological treatise rather than via a feature film. This is a common feature of films about real-life serial killers. For example, "Monster", about Aileen Wuornos, tries to explain her murderous behaviour in terms of her miserable childhood, but this only raises a further question of why many women with equally miserable childhoods do not grow up to become serial killers.
And yet "Extremely wicked..." is in many ways a film worth watching. (Much more so than the overrated "Monster"). Zac Efron has the necessary looks and charisma to convey the fascination which Bundy was able to inspire, while never losing sight of the man's dark side. There is another good performance from Lily Collins as Liz, a woman confronted with the almost unbearable truth that her whole relationship with Ted had been based on a lie and that the man she loved was indescribably evil. The film may not answer unanswerable questions, but at least it sheds some light on the man at the centre of this mystery. 7/10.
Doctor Who: Four Hundred Dawns (1965)
Crude and Unconvincing Animation
Three of the four episodes of "Galaxy 4" are currently missing; all four were wiped by the BBC in the late 1960s, but the third episode was recovered in 2011. All four episodes have now been reconstructed using animation and sound recordings.
The First Doctor and his companions Vicki and Steven arrive on an alien planet. The surface of the planet is an arid desert, and at first they believe it to be devoid of life, although it clearly has clumps of vegetation. Perhaps they meant "devoid of animal life". The script makes use of a plot line used in two serials of the second season, "The Web Planet" and "The Space Museum", namely two different alien races battling one another. Here the two races are the Drahvins, who have the appearance of beautiful women, and the ugly, vaguely reptilian Rills. In an original twist, the scriptwriter William Emms made the beautiful Drahvins evil and the ugly Rills good. The Drahvins have a vaguely fascist social system based upon unquestioning obedience to their leader, Maaga; the Rills are a philosophical race, generally peaceful and only resorting to the use of force in self-defence.
Whereas the Zarbi and the Menoptra in "The Web Planet" and the Xerons and the Moroks in "The Space Museum" were fighting one another for control of their respective planets, the planet in "Galaxy 4" is not worth fighting for because it is due to explode in two days time. (Exactly what will cause it to do so, and how the time of its destruction can be so precisely calculated, is never explained). Both the Drahvins and the Rills have crash-landed on the planet; the main question in the story is "Who will manage to escape before the planet self-destructs?" The Rills are unable to breathe the planet's atmosphere so must remain in their spaceship; they can only explore the surface by using robots which Vicki names "Chumblies".
The only other animated "Doctor Who" episodes I have seen were the two needed to complete the partly-missing serial "The Reign of Terror". Those were done in a very different style, one designed to match the look of the surviving four black-and-white episodes as closely as possible. With "Galaxy 4" the animators had a free hand. Although the original programme was broadcast in black and white, the animations are in colour, much more cartoonish than those for "The Reign of Terror". I must admit that I did not like them very much; they seemed crude and unconvincing, especially in their depiction of movement.
I never saw the original serial when first broadcast in the autumn of 1965; I was only a young child at the time. With a serial which now only exists in animated form, and where the original visuals can no longer be seen, it is difficult to comment on the quality of the acting. The storyline has points of interest, even if some of the cast, including William Hartnell, did not like it. The quality of the animation, however, meant that I did not really enjoy this story. 5/10, with the proviso that I reserve the right to revisit that mark in the unlikely event of the lost episodes resurfacing.
Torvill & Dean (2018)
Bland and Insipid
To anyone of my generation, particularly to anyone who shares my love of figure skating, the names "Torvill and Dean" will take us back to a winter's evening in 1984 when Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, two young people from Nottingham competing in the Winter Olympics at Sarajevo, electrified the world with their ice dance routine to Maurice Ravel's "Bolero". This routine received twelve perfect 6.0s and six 5.9s, including artistic impression scores of 6.0 from every judge, setting an Olympic record which has never been equalled since, and never will be, now that the system of scoring has been changed. (They achieved even better scores at the World Championships in Ottawa a few weeks later, but somehow nobody seems to remember that so well). What made "Bolero" so electrifying was not just the high marks or the technical skills involved, but also its dramatic and emotional content. Torvill and Dean were, along with their East German contemporary Katarina Witt, part of what might be called the "New Skating" movement which sought to turn figure skating from a sporting discipline into an art form.
To anyone of a younger generation, Torvill and Dean are, at most, names from the sporting history books. I was therefore surprised to learn that this filmed biography of the pair was made as late as 2018, 34 years after their greatest triumph.
There is perhaps a reason why no film about Torvill and Dean was made while they were still in the public eye. As I observed when I reviewed "On Thin Ice", another biopic about a figure skating couple, the Americans Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, there is a convention that films about sport, regardless of whether they are based upon fact or wholly fictitious, should be based upon one of two plots. One of these can be titled "Triumph against the Odds", and the other "The Rise and Fall of a Champion" (together with its variant "The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of a Champion").
The "odds" in that first title can be either literal (stories about the underdog or rank outsider who defeats a more fancied opponent) or metaphorical (stories about someone who overcomes injury or some other personal disadvantage in order to achieve success). "Rise and fall" stories tell the story of a champion who achieves success but then loses it, generally because of some character flaw or personal demons. Plots like this may seem clichéd, but the convention is a necessary one because no film can recreate the drama and excitement of a live sporting event. (In "Torvill and Dean", for example, we see little of the couple on the ice, apart fro some archive footage of "Bolero" at the very end). Film-makers, therefore, need to tell a human story, not just a sporting one.
Sporting films which ignore the convention tend to be bland and uninteresting. Not all sporting champions, however successful, gifted or widely admired they may be, qualify to have their lives made into a film, largely because most do not have a riveting human interest story underlying the tale of their successes.
And, to be honest, Torvill and Dean do not have such a story. They were what they seemed, a likeable young couple who, through talent, hard work and determination, achieved a run of wins at successive British, European and World Championships. Their crowning triumph in Sarajevo was not achieved against the odds; they were hot favourites to win. They did not rise and then fall from grace, turning professional immediately after the 1984 season. (They made a brief comeback at the 1994 Olympics, winning bronze, but that is not covered in the film). What human interest there is in "On Thin Ice" derives from Tai Babilonia's fight against depression and drug addiction after leaving competitive skating; there is nothing comparable in the Torvill and Dean story.
Because of my interest in the sport I often watch films about figure skating when they come on television. There are occasional good ones, such as the excellent "I, Tonya", one of the best films of 2017, but then that was about Tonya Harding, who had enough human interest in her life-story to fill several volumes. More often I am disappointed, and "Torvill and Dean" is one of the disappointments, a bland and insipid biopic. Anyone who wants to know more about the real Jayne and Christopher should watch the recordings of their performances on Youtube. 3/10.
Dance Hall (1950)
Dance Hall Generation
During my youth in the seventies and eighties my contemporaries and I found it difficult to understand what an important role ballroom dancing had played in the lives of my parents' generation. For many of that generation, including my mother, dancing at the local dance hall was their main form of social recreation and a popular way of meeting the opposite sex. By the time I was in my teens, however, that role had been usurped by the discotheque and ballroom relegated to the status of a rather eccentric niche enthusiasm.
"Dance Hall" from 1950 is a film which centres upon the ballroom craze. In some ways it anticipates the "kitchen sink" social-realist dramas which were to be a major feature of the British cinema later in the decade and in the sixties. It was made by Ealing Studios, better known for their comedies, and directed by Charles Crichton who was later to make two of the most famous of those comedies, "The Lavender Hill Mob" and "The Titfield Thunderbolt".
When the film occasionally turns up on British television, it is normally billed as "starring Diana Dors". In fact, Dors would still have been a teenager in 1950, and her role in the film is a relatively minor one, but she has become far better known than most of the actors cast above her, except perhaps for Petula Clark who today is more famous as a singer than as an actress.
The plot centres on four young women from West London who work in a factory and whose main recreation is dancing at the local dance hall. As might be expected, the main emphasis is upon their relationships with their boyfriends. The main story concerns Eve, a keen dancer, and her boyfriend Phil whose main love is flying and who has no interest in dancing. (This would suggest that there may be a difference in social class between eve and Phil, as flying is not a cheap hobby, but nothing is made of this aspect). Eve ditches Phil in favour of her dance partner Alec, but returns to him when she decides that Alec is not serious about her. Eve and Phil marry, but their marriage is put under strain by his jealousy of Alec.
Another strand in the plot concerns Georgie and her boyfriend and dance partner Peter, and their attempt to win an amateur dancing competition. At this period ballroom dancing was not just something people did for recreation, but also an amateur, and even a professional, competitive sport.
"Dance Hall" may have been a forerunner of the "kitchen sink" school of film-making, but it is not in the same class as the best of those films, like "A Kind of Loving" and "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning". Such films were generally powerful dramas with a strongly-drawn hero (or occasionally heroine, as in "A Taste of Honey") at the centre. There is nothing comparable in "Dance Hall"; both Natasha Parry as Eve and Donald Houston as Phil are forgettable, and we never feel any great emotional connection with them. Diana Dors was to call it "a ghastly film - quite one of the nastiest I ever made," and it is hard not to agree with her. In 1950 the main appeal of the film was probably to the dance hall generation themselves, who would have seen in it a reflection of their own lives as well as enjoying the music. To young people of today, however, to whom the dance hall subculture is even more alien than it was to my generation, a film like this is probably largely incomprehensible. 4/10.
The Night of the Generals (1967)
One-time prestige production, now largely forgotten
One night in December 1942 a prostitute is brutally murdered in German-occupied Warsaw. The death of a Polish prostitute would normally be of no concern to the Nazi occupiers, but because the woman was also a German agent, Major Grau of German intelligence begins an investigation. An eye-witness states that he saw a man in the uniform of a German general leaving the dead woman's room, and Grau's inquiries reveal that of the many German generals stationed in the city, only three do not have an alibi for the night in question- General von Seidlitz-Gabler, General Kahlenberge and General Tanz. Alarmed at where Grau's investigation seems to be leading, the authorities promote him and transfer him to Paris.
Fast forward to July 1944. Grau and all three generals are in Paris at the same time. The storyline becomes involved with the story of Operation Valkyrie, the plot to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi government. Kahlenberge is a member of the plot while Seidlitz-Gabler is aware of it but refuses to commit himself to it, preferring to sit on the sidelines. Tanz has been kept in ignorance of the plot; the plotters know that he is loyal to the regime and would not hesitate to betray them if he got wind of it. In the meantime, another prostitute has been found dead, murdered in the same way as the woman in Warsaw.
All three generals are well played and individualised. Kahlenberge, like many high-ranking German officers, has been placed in an impossible position. He loves his country but hates the Nazi regime, and can only escape from that permission by tearing up the sacred oath which, like all German soldiers, he has sworn to Hitler. Seidlitz-Gabler is cynical and self-interested with a reputation as a womaniser. He has no love for the Nazis but no great hatred for them either, and his main concern is to ensure his own survival. Kahlenberge is played by Donald Pleasence and Seidlitz-Gabler by Charles Gray, thus uniting two actors who are linked together in my mind for a quite different reason; both played James Bond's adversary Blofeld during the Connery era.
It will therefore come as no surprise when Tanz is exposed as the murderer; Kahlenberge is too basically decent and Seidlitz-Gabler too cowardly and passive to kill women for the sheer pleasure of killing. Tanz's loyalty to the Nazi regime is less a matter of ideology than of psychology. His is a violent, hate-filled, warlike nature, so he is instinctively drawn to a violent, hate-filled, warlike political movement which gives him every opportunity to act on House Sparrow sadistic impulses. Like Hitler, he delights in war and killing, and sees his compulsion to murder prostitutes as no different from the slaughter which he and his subordinates perpetrate on the battlefield. Peter O'Toole's style of acting is not to everyone's taste, but I felt that it was well suited here to his portrayal of this urbane but vicious killer.
Unfortunately, the other acting performances are not always of the same standard as these three. Omar Sharif is grey and anonymous in the key role of Grau, which is unfortunately appropriate given his character's name. (Grau is German for "grey"). Sharif and O'Toole had previously appeared together4 in "Lawrence of arabia", also produced by Sam Spiegel. Tom Courtenay, whose work I have admired in other films such as "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", "Billy Liar" and "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", is not at his best here as Tanz's driver Corporal Hartmann, who plays an important role.
I also felt that the film is overlong and poorly structured, with the action jumping between the 1940s and the 1960s. (The investigation is still continuing twenty years after the end of the war, even though Grau is by this time dead, having been taken up by a French detective who was in the wartime Resistance). The Operation Valkyrie subplot often overshadows the main murder mystery, which reduces the tension as we all know that the operation was doomed to end in failure. There is another, rather unnecessary, subplot about Hartmann's romance with Seidlitz-Gabler's daughter. In its day, "The Night of the Generals" was clearly regarded as a large-scale prestige production, but today it is largely forgotten, and I cannot say it really deserves to be remembered. 6/10, largely for some decent acting.
Some goofs. The pronunciation of German names is not always accurate. The final "e" in "Kahlenberge" should be sounded, and the name of Seidlitz-Gabler's wife Eleonore is approximately "Ellay-o-Nora"; it is not pronounced like the English "Eleanor". Had Operation Valkyrie succeeded, Germany's new head of state would have been General Ludwig Beck, not Rommel. Among the stolen paintings due to be shipped to Goering's private collection we see Chagall's "The Green Fiddler", which is in the Guggenheim Museum, New York, not in Paris. And it seems inconceivable that Goering would have bothered to steal a work by a Jewish artist.
Fire Over England (1937)
More Than a Swashbuckler
"Fire Over England" is the sort of swashbuckler which, had it been made in America, would probably have starred Errol Flynn. Flynn, in fact, was to make a similar film, "The Sea Hawk", three years later. Both films are historical drama about England's victory over the Spanish Armada. In "The Sea Hawk" Flynn plays Captain Geoffrey Thorpe, a thinly fictionalised version of Sir Francis Drake. In "Fire over England" the main lead, Michael Ingolby, played by a young Laurence Olivier, is a wholly fictional character with no historical equivalent.
Michael has a hatred of the Spaniards after they burned his father, captured in a sea-battle, as a heretic, and offers his services to Queen Elizabeth. The Earl of Leicester, the head of Elizabeth's intelligence service, offers him a dangerous mission to infiltrate the Spanish court pretending to be a pro-Spanish traitor and thereby find out the names of the real traitors who are plotting to kidnap Elizabeth. As in any good swashbuckler there has to be at least one lovely heroine, and here there are two as Michael finds himself torn between Elena, a beautiful Spanish lady who has fallen for him, and Cynthia, his sweetheart back in England. Cynthia is played by Olivier's real-life girlfriend (later his wife) Vivien Leigh. This was the first film they made together.
The film, however, is more than just a swashbuckler. Like many historical adventures on both sides of the Atlantic from the late thirties and early forties, this one has a political agenda. The producer Alexander Korda was strongly anti-Nazi and anti-appeasement, and used the film to draw parallels between the political situation in the Europe of the 1580s with that of the 1930s. King Philip of Spain is portrayed as a megalomaniac with ambitions of world domination, and the English war against Spain becomes a heroic fight for freedom. The message to the Britain of 1937 was unmistakeable; we have stood up to, and defeated, one tyrant in the past, and we must do the same to that Hitler fellow! The traitor Hillary Vane (played by a young pre-stardom James Mason) was probably intended as an unflattering portrait of the pro-appeasement lobby. Excerpts from the film were included in "The Lion Has Wings", the first British propaganda film made after the outbreak of war in 1939.
"The Sea Hawk", made in Hollywood after Britain had declared war but America had not, has a similar anti-Nazi agenda. Korda himself, after moving to America, was to make another film, "That Hamilton Woman", also starring Olivier and Leigh, which sought to draw parallels between Britain's fight against an earlier dictator, in that case Napoleon, and her fight against Hitler. This film made Korda unpopular with America's powerful isolationist lobby; according to one story he was summoned to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and only excused when the attack on Pearl Harbor took place the day before his scheduled attendance.
Flynn had a fairly narrow range as an actor, but within that range he could be very good, and in his day he was the unchallenged king of the swashbuckler. Even a major star like Olivier (who had a much wider range) does not make as much impact here as Flynn was to do in "The Sea Hawk". The best acting performances come from Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth, an indomitable symbol of English courage and determination, and from Raymond Massey as King Philip. Massey resisted the temptation to make Philip into a ranting Hitler-style maniac; better to let the parallel speak for itself. His Philip is a ruthless fanatic, but a cold and calculating one.
"The Sea Hawk" still stands up well today and can be enjoyed as an exciting drama from the Golden Age of Hollywood, independent of the political considerations which inspired it in 1940. I don't think that "Fire over England" has stood the test of time as well. With a less charismatic hero and a sometimes muddled plot, it comes across today as a curiosity from a bygone age. 6/10
Some goofs. In reality Elizabeth I's intelligence chief was not Leicester but Sir Francis Walsingham, who does not appear in the film. Part of the action takes place near Lisbon, which the scriptwriter clearly believed was in Spain not Portugal. The name of Philip's palace, El Escorial, is misspelt in a title card as "El Escurial" and that of the Spanish Admiral Valdés in the cast list as "Valdez". (The spelling "Valdez" is largely found in Latin America; the two names are pronounced identically in Latin American Spanish but not European Spanish). Contrary to what is shown here, no Spanish ships were actually set alight by the English fireships; the point of using this tactic was to force them out into the open sea where they could more easily be attacked.
Josie (2018)
Does not succeed either as a thriller or as an "issue" movie
Hank is a middle-aged man who works as a guard at the local high school. Being British, I am not really familiar with the concept of a "school guard", and it would seem that Hank's job has less to do with protecting the schoolchildren than with sitting in his car in the parking lot and making sure that none of them try and bunk off before the official end of the school day.
Hank forms a close friendship with Josie, one of the students who has recently moved to the school. The film never explicitly states whether their relationship is sexual, or even romantic, in nature, but it is close enough to worry Hank's neighbour Martha, who warns him about what she sees as an inappropriate relationship with an underage girl. Another person who resents this relationships Marcus, one of Josie's classmates who sees himself as her boyfriend and who has a long-standing feud with Hank, who has often had cause to reprimand him for his bad behaviour.
Josie, however, does not come across as underage. She seems more like a woman in her termites than a teenage girl. She does not live with her parents or a guardian, but has a room in the motel where Hank lives, and never really explains where her family are. She is clearly hiding a secret, but is not the only one. Hank has a secret in his past. He formerly worked as a prison guard in the state prison at Huntsville, Texas. Part of his duties involved tying down death row prisoners about to be executed, but he quit his job after one of these men was found to be innocent after his execution. Despite quitting, he is still haunted by remorse about his part in the man's death.
This is a short film, at only 87 minutes in length shorter than most modern feature films. Paradoxically, however, at times it can seem overlong. For much of its length it seemed to me to be going nowhere; only in the last quarter of an hour does anything happen as we learn Josie's secret identity and events rush to their shocking conclusion. That doesn't seem a very efficient way of making a thriller, which needs to hold the audience's interest throughout. The film might have been able to make a meaningful statement about the death penalty had it not been so keen to condemn state-sponsored revenge while embracing an ethos of private revenge which undermines any point it is trying to make. "Josie" does not succeed as either a thriller or an "issue" movie. 4/10.
Look at Life: High, Wide and Faster (1963)
Inevitably Superficial
"Look at Life" was a series of short documentary films made between 1959 and 1969 by the Rank Organisation for screening in cinemas as "fillers" between the A and B feature films. Over 500 were produced, mostly concerning some aspect of life in Britain, although some dealt with other countries. They were normally around 8 minutes long and featured a voice-over by an invisible narrator (often the actor Tim Turner).
"High, Wide and Faster" was made in 1963 and takes a look at the future of Britain's transport system. (Transport was a popular theme of the "Look at Life" series, possibly because of the influence of British Transport Films, which had been making similar documentaries since 1949). This was, of course, a very wide subject, and at 17 minutes the film was considerably longer than most in the "Look at Life" series. Even so, a much longer film would have been needed to go into the subject in any depth, and some aspects of transport, such as air travel, are ignored in favour of road, rail and shipping. This last is mostly dealt with in terms of the creation of new port facilities. Containerisation is not mentioned; presumably it had not yet started to revolutionise the goods transport industry in the way that it would several years later.
In 1963 there were around six and a half million cars on Britain's roads; it was estimated that this figure would double by 1970 and treble by 1980. (This prediction was to prove remarkably accurate). The early sixties saw the beginning of the British motorway-building programme, something covered in this film.
As Britain's roads were expanding, however, her railways were shrinking. This was the period of the "Beeching Axe" a programme of railway closures, involving closing some 5,000 miles of track and over 2,000 stations, named after Dr Richard Beeching, the Chairman of British Rail who presided over it. The film presents the "Axe" in a positive light, but only does so by concentrating on the profit-and-loss side of the equation and ignoring the importance of the axed railway lines as part of the nation's infrastructure. The film also covers the introduction of new high speed passenger services such as the Blue Pullman service, luxury inter-city express trains pulled by diesel locomotives painted a distinctive shade of blue. (The Blue Pullmans had been the subject of their own BFT documentary three years earlier).
The film deals with its subject-matter in a rather superficial way, but that is perhaps inevitable given that never intended to be anything other than a brief filler. Few people, after all, have ever gone to the cinema to watch the fillers rather than the main feature.
Shoulder to Shoulder (1974)
March of the Women
"Shoulder to Shoulder" is a BBC television serial from 1974 about the history of the Women's Social and Political Union, which fought for votes for women during the early twentieth century. The title derives from a line in the movement's anthem, "March of the Women", composed by Dame Ethel Smythe, herself a leading member. The serial is divided into six episodes, each focusing on one of the movement's leading lights- its founder Emmeline Pankhurst, her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, the working class Annie Kenney, the aristocratic Lady Constance Lytton and Emily Davidson. Davidson became the movement's most prominent martyr when she threw herself in front of the King's horse at the 1913 Derby.
It always surprises me how long it took for the women's suffrage movement to become a major force in British politics. Although some thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft had argued in favour of equal rights for women, earlier campaigns for electoral reform had largely ignored the issue. The 1832 Reform Act, for example, explicitly restricted the franchise to men, but few people at the time raised much of a protest. It was not until the late nineteenth century that there was a large-scale organised movement in favour of giving women the vote. It should be noted that at this period Britain (unlike some other countries such as France and Germany) did to have universal male suffrage; only around two thirds of British men had the vote, which was still linked to property qualifications. A criticism sometimes made of the suffragettes was that they were mostly middle-class women who resented the fact that many working-class men, whom they saw as their social inferiors, enjoyed a right which they were denied.
I would have two main criticisms of the series, which was recently shown on BBC4 as part of its policy of reviving classic dramas, many of which have not been seen since their original broadcast. The first would be that some of the episodes are overlong, with more talk than action. (Ironical, given that the movement's motto was "Deeds, not words"). We hear, for example, of Davidson's suicidal action, but it is not shown on screen, perhaps because it would not have been possible to re-enact it convincingly, given the limited budget of many BBC programmes.
My second criticism is more fundamental. The programme gives the misleading impression that the WSPU and the women's suffrage movement were virtually synonymous. In fact, it was only one of several groups fighting for votes to be given to women. The series makes no mention of the largest of these, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies or of its leader Millicent Fawcett. The nearest the programme comes to acknowledging its existence is when Constance Lytton makes a brief reference to other women's movements which according to her attracted less support. In fact, the NUWSS had far more members than the WSPU.
The decision to ignore it may have been deliberate, as part of the programme's tendentious thesis that radical direct action is necessary to bring about social change. Unlike the Pankhursts who deliberately organised a campaign of violence, including bombings, in order to secure their ends, Mrs Fawcett and her organisation had a strict policy of non-violence and respect for the law, which may have won more converts to their cause than the antics of the WSPU. Contrary to the impression given by the script, the WSPU's violence was not directed solely at property; four people were killed by suffragette bombs, and several others injured.
The serial's main strength is the power of the acting, particularly from Sian Phillips as Emmeline Pankhurst and Patricia Quinn as Christabel. Phillips was a frequent star of British television in the mid-seventies, generally playing strong, determined women like Empress Livia in "I, Claudius" and the Welsh matriarch in "How Green Was My Valley". Both Phillips and Quinn resist the temptation to idealise their characters. Both Emmeline and Christabel were passionate idealists, with great reserves of both moral and physical courage, but they also had their weaknesses.
Emmeline at times comes across as something of a snob, the sort of well-to-do intellectual socialist who believes that socialism is a top-down ideology which the liberal bourgeoisie have a duty to force upon the working class for their own good. Christabel is beautiful and charismatic, but arrogant and autocratic, and will brook no opposition to her will. Angela Down's Sylvia is more sympathetic, but at times unrealistic, as when she tries to recruit an illiterate East End girl into the movement by quoting to her from Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte and John Stuart Mill, writers whom the girl is unlikely ever to have heard of, much less read. Other good contributions come from Fulton Mackay (of "Porridge" fame) as the Socialist leader Keir Hardie and Robert Hardy as the crafty Prime Minister Asquith, who never says anything against the cause of women's suffrage but never does anything to advance it. (Words, not deeds). The one contribution I did not like came from Judy Parfitt who never convinced me that Constance Lytton was anything other than a spoilt little rich girl and a neurotic pain in the neck, which was probably not the idea. The programme had its strengths, but it might have been improved by cutting each episode down to an hour from around an hour and a quarter, and by acknowledging that the Pankhursts' organisation was not solely responsible for winning women the vote. 6/10.
Christopher Robin (2018)
Of very little brain but also of very big heart
There have been some strange coincidences in the history of the cinema. In 1973 two studios were independently working on disaster movies about a fire in a skyscraper. When they discovered the coincidence they combined forces to produce the film now known as "The Towering Inferno". There were two biopics of Oscar Wilde in 1960 and two of Coco Chanel in 2009, and two versions of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" in 1973, and two of Wilde's "An Ideal Husband" in 1999/2000.
And in 2017/18 there were two films based on the life of the English bookseller C. R. Milne, better known as Christopher Robin, the inspiration for the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books written by his father A. A. Milne. "Goodbye Christopher Robin" is a relatively straightforward historical drama about the real Christopher Robin's Childhood.
"Christopher Robin", by contrast, is a fantasy based around a fictitious character only loosely based upon the real C. R. Milne. This character is also called Christopher Robin, but here "Robin" is his surname rather than a second Christian name. He is married to a woman named Evelyn, has a daughter named Madeline and works as a white-collar executive for a London company who make luggage. He owns a country home on Ashdown Forest in Sussex, which he inherited from his father who died when he was a child.
In reality, C. R. Milne worked as a bookseller in Devon. His wife was called Lesley and his daughter Claire. A. A. Milne lived until 1956, by which time his son was 36. Christopher Robin never owned Cotchford Farm, the family's Sussex home, and indeed never visited it after his father died. These differences between the film and real life are not, however, goofs; they serve to emphasise the fictional nature of the story.
Your tagline for the film describes Christopher Robin asa "working-class family man", although this is not really accurate. He holds a senior position with his firm, owns an elegant London townhouse as well as his country home and can afford to run a car, which few British people in the late forties could, so I would describe him as affluent middle-class. Despite his affluence, however, when we meet Christopher he is not a happy man. He is a workaholic, forced to work ever-longer hours to meet the demands of his overbearing boss Mr Winslow, and has little time to spare for his wife and daughter. He has also lost touch with his old friends. This being a fantasy, the "old friends" in question are not old school or college pals or Army comrades, but Pooh, Piglet, Tigger and the other denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood.
And then one day Pooh mysteriously reappears in the garden of Christopher's London home. Pooh is worried because Piglet and the others seem to have disappeared, and he and Christopher travel down to Sussex to search for them. The film then follows their adventures in the forest.
The film was made by the Disney organisation, who made the original cartoon version of "Winnie the Pooh", along with numerous sequels. It is not, however, a cartoon, but a live action film with CGI used to realise Pooh and his friends. As the film was made by Disney, they used the same voice actors as had been used in the cartoons, which explains why Pooh and Tigger still have American accents, something which has always been controversial with British audiences. (When I was a child my mother, never a great lover of anything American, refused to take my sisters and myself to see the cartoon for this very reason).
A film like this could easily have ended up as sentimental whimsy; that it does not is due largely to an intelligent, well-written script and a fine performance from Ewan McGregor in the leading role. McGregor has not always been my favourite actor- he did, after all, take the leading role in that misbegotten nonsense "Moulin Rouge"- but here he is excellent in what may be his best film since "Big Fish". One critic called him "the glue that holds the whole thing together", and I would certainly agree, playing Christopher as a sort of disillusioned white-collar Everyman reminiscent of David Nobbs's Reggie Perrin. And, with all due respect to my mother's stand against Yankee cultural imperialism, I also liked Jim Cummings's interpretation of Pooh as a sort of humble cracker-barrel philosopher of very little brain but also of very big heart (to quote a line from the film).
Despite the Winnie-the-Pooh theme, this is not really a film for children- it is a bit too grown-up in tone- and probably will not have much interest for adults not familiar with the original stories. But those who like me grew up with Pooh during our childhoods will probably find much to enjoy in this fable about love, friendship, family, having fun and the importance of a work/life balance. 8/10.
We're No Angels (1989)
One of the Best Comedies of the Late Eighties
This "We're No Angels" is ostensibly a remake of the 1955 film of the same name, although the two films have little in common beyond the fact that both are comedies about escaped convicts. The 1955 film is set in French Guiana in the 1890s and involves three convicts; the 1989 film is set in upstate New York in the 1930s and only involves two convicts. The plots of the two films, moreover, are quite different.
Hollywood has a long tradition, dating back at least to "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang" in the thirties, of showing the American penal system in a bad light. Think of all those films like "Cool Hand Luke", "Escape from Alcatraz" and "The Shawshank Redemption" which show prisons as brutal places ruled by corrupt or sadistic wardens and guards who delight in tormenting the inmates. The prison shown in "We're No Angels" is a particularly grim hell-hole, like something out of Piranesi's "Carceri d'Invenzione", presided over by a particularly vicious warden.
The two main characters are a pair of convicts named Ned and Jim. (We never learn the crimes of which they have been convicted). When a ruthless murderer named Bobby breaks out of jail, they are forced to accompany him. They arrive in a small town on the border between Canada and the USA. They believe that to escape to freedom they only have to cross a bridge over the river separating the two countries, but things are not as easy as they seem. Firstly, the warden has sent search parties out to look for them and to guard the bridge. Secondly, owing to a misunderstanding they are mistaken for a pair of priests who are expected at the local monastery. They see a chance to escape, however, by taking part in a procession to the monastery's sister church on the Canadian side. (One thing the film never explores is whether they could be extradited back to the States from Canada; we simply have to accept that once in Canada they will be free).
Most of Robert De Niro's best performances have come in serious dramas like "Taxi Driver", "Raging Bull", "King of Comedy"- not a comedy despite the name- "The Mission" and "The Fan". To say nothing of "Godfather II". I have not always been impressed by his attempts to branch out into comedy. I have to admit, however, that he is good here as Ned, perhaps because, if not quite a black comedy, this is definitely a comedy with a serious edge. This is particularly true of the opening scenes. In that hellish prison; Bobby's escape attempt involves several guards getting shot. Even in the later scenes, however, the darkness never quite goes away, especially when Bobby reappears during the procession. The action takes place in winter, and the visual look of the film is bleak and forbidding.
The film was not a box-office success when released in 1989. One critic attributed its failure to its religious theme, with non-believers assuming it would be a sermon on celluloid and believers assuming it would be an anti-religious satire. In my view, however, it does not fall neatly into either category. There are certainly elements of mockery, mostly aimed at the pompous visiting Croatian bishop and his fussy little translator, men who are sticklers for punctiliously observing the forms of religious ceremony but who somehow ignore the real meaning of the gospels. The local priest Father Levesque, however, is a more liberal and kindly spirit, and the overall tone is more pro-religious than anti. This is emphasised by Sean Penn's Jim, a man who has never thought much about God or religion until he is forced to do so by his enforced disguise as a priest. While Ned remains fixated on escape to Canada, Jim ends up remaining in the monastery where he can explore his new-found faith.
De Niro and Penn both give fine performances, bringing the right mixture of comedy and seriousness to their roles. Other good performances come from Ray McInally, in his last film before his death, as the Warden, and Demi Moore as Molly, a local laundress and part-time prostitute, who becomes Ned's love-interest. When we first meet Molly she is depressed and embittered because of her poverty and because she is the unmarried mother of a handicapped daughter. Under the influence of her friendship with Ned, however, and what can be seen as a miracle of her own, she gradually becomes warmer and more human. Despite the film's initial box-office failure, it is in my view one of the best comedies of the late eighties. I won't compare it in terms of quality with the 1955 film, which I have not seen for many years. 8/10.
Play for Today: Blue Remembered Hills (1979)
The Land of Lost Content
Dennis Potter was a regular contributor to the BBC's "Play for Today", and "Blue Remembered Hills" was his seventh entry in the series. (He had also written some for its predecessor, "The Wednesday Play"). Like a number of his other plays, it is set in his native Forest of Dean, the western part of Gloucestershire on the Welsh border, and the dialogue is written in the local dialect.
One summer afternoon in 1943, a group of seven-year-old children go out to play in the countryside. That sentence reveals just how much British society has changed in the last eighty years. In the forties, it was quite common for parents to allow young children to wander more or less at will provided they were home by teatime. This was still true to some extent during my own childhood in the sixties and seventies, although at the age of seven I was not allowed to roam too far or to cross any major roads. (Later, when I was a teenager with a bike I had more freedom). Today, however, most parents would insist that their children are under their direct supervision at all times and certainly do not allow them to go a-roaming.
There are seven children in all- five boys (John, Peter, Willie, Ray and Donald) and two girls, Angela and Audrey. We follow them through their games, their conversations and their quarrels. Potter was clearly not a believer in the idea of the innocence of childhood; his children spend a considerable amount of time in quarrelling, bickering and even fighting.
Among the boys there is a clear dominance hierarchy. This is headed by a boy named Wallace Wilson, whom the others all clearly respect and look up to as a sort of natural leader. Wallace is referred to several times, although he never appears on screen. Among those we actually see, the position of top dog is contested by John and Peter, stronger and more self-confident than the others; at one time their contest breaks out into an actual fight. Next comes Willie, then the shy and stammering Ray. Bottom of the heap is the strange, possibly disturbed Donald, who does not want to play with the other boys, who mock him as "Donald Duck" or "Quack-Quack". Donald seems to prefer his own company, although he joins in the girls' favourite game of "mummies and daddies". As girls, Angela and Audrey stand outside the hierarchy, although the boys have a certain respect for Audrey who, although diminutive, will lash out with her fists at any boy who provokes her too far.
The most striking feature of the play is that the children are all played by adult actors, a device which Potter had earlier used in his Wednesday Play "Stand Up Nigel Barton". Its relevance here is to stress a key theme of the play. Potter said that childhood "is not the adult world writ small; it is the adult world writ large" and "adult society without all the conventions and the polite forms which overlay it," - that is to say the conventions and polite forms which ordinarily prevent adults from insulting one another to their faces and rolling around in the mud fighting. This idea that "the child is father to the man" is a common one in Potter's work; it also featured, for example, in an earlier "Play for Today", "Traitor".
The title "Blue Remembered Hills" is taken from one of the poems in A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad". The full poem is read by Potter himself at the end of the play. The second and final verse reads:-
"That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again".
There is a literary tradition of works on Housman's theme, works in which the main character looks back nostalgically at the lost world of his or her youth to which he or she can, for one reason or another, no longer return. I am thinking of the likes of Alain-Fournier's "Le Grand Meaulnes", Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" and Giorgio Bassani's "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis". "Blue Remembered Hills" is another in this tradition, with the difference that we never actually see Potter's characters as adults. We know, however, that the violent and shocking events at the end of the play mean that, even as seven-year-old children, they have been exiled from their "land of lost content".
The acting from the ensemble cast is uniformly excellent, meaning that I cannot pick out any individual contributions, and Potter's dialogue is perceptive and often witty. The ending is particularly powerful and moving. I certainly have not seen all of the "Plays for Today"- it will be a long time, if ever, before I achieve that goal- but of those I have seen I would rank "Blue Remembered Hills" among the best, along with the likes of "The Cellar and the Almond Tree", "Abigail's Party" and "Too Late to Talk to Billy". 9/10.
Love on Ice (2017)
Lacks technical merit and fails to make an artistic impression
Spencer Patterson, a young figure skating coach, is hired to coach
Nikki Lee, a teenager from Lakeville, Michigan, who shows great promise as a skater. (There is in fact no town called Lakeville in Michigan, although there is a town of that name in Minnesota). At the rink Spencer meets another Lakeville resident, a young woman named Emily James, who herself was once one of America's leading figure skaters but who mysteriously walked away from the sport eight years ago. (We later learn the reason why she did so). Emily now works as a waitress in a cafe, but spends her spare time at the rink, teaching young children to skate.
Spencer invites Emily to assist him with coaching Nikki, and realising that Emily still has great talent for the sport asks her if she would be willing to return to competition with him as her coach. After some hesitation, Emily agrees, but this situation is not to the liking of Nikki's pushy mother, Mia, who sacks Spencer as Nikki's coach and instead appoints Emily's old coach, Leslie Adams.
Which leaves only two questions to be answered. "Will Nikki or Emily win when the two of them skate off against one another in an important regional competition?" and "Will the handsome Spencer and the pretty Emily find love together?" And as the film is called "Love on Ice" we all know what the answer to that second question will be.
I normally avoid the Hallmark Channel and its works like the plague, but I watched this one because of my keen interest in figure skating, a sport largely overlooked by the movie industry. Unfortunately, it only served to remind me just why I don't like Hallmark. Their stated intention is to make "family" movies, but there is more to making family films than a scrupulous avoidance of sex, violence and bad language. You also have to make something that will hold the family's interest, and I suspect that if a film like this had been offered to me when I was a child, I would have been bored to tears. And so would my parents and siblings.
Apart from Leslie, who has a spiteful side to her nature, all the characters are just so nice. We never get any sense of rivalry between Nikki and Emily, because both are as sweet and wholesome as apple pie. It doesn't really matter which of them wins the skating contest, because both will take the god medal for cuteness. Spencer is a thoroughly decent young chap. Mia may be pushy and overbearing, but we sense that her heart is really in the right place and that she only wants the best for her talented daughter. The result is a film without any real conflict or drama, except briefly in some of the Leslie scenes, which means a film without any real interest.
Also, the skating scenes struck me as unrealistic; I could never accept either Emily or Nikki (or whoever was acting as their stunt doubles) as elite skaters, performing single jumps where real elite skaters would perform doubles or (preferably) triples. To describe the film in skating terms, it lacks technical merit and fails to make an artistic impression. 4/10.
Blithe Spirit (1945)
Its "classic" status owes more to Lean's reputation than it does to its own merits
"Blithe Spirit" was a product of what might be called David Lean's "Coward Period". His first four films, made between 1942 and 1945, were all based on work by Noël Coward. (The others are "In Which We Serve", "This Happy Breed" and "Brief Encounter"). Coward's play of the same name had opened in the West End in 1941 and had been a great success; the production was still running when this film was made. A Broadway production had also proved successful.
The Second World War saw an increase in interest in all things supernatural (as had the first), and Coward wrote his play to cash in on this interest. (He seems to have had no personal belief in the occult). The play is about a man haunted by the ghost of his first wife. Charles Condomine, a successful and wealthy writer, invites Madame Arcati, a medium, to conduct a seance in his country home. (Somewhere in East Kent, to judge from references to Ashford, Folkestone and Canterbury). Charles has no more belief in the supernatural than Coward did; he wants to take part in a seance as part of his research for his latest novel, and he privately considers Madame Arcati a fraud.
She is not, however, such a fraud as Charles believes her, and she succeeds in conjuring up the spirit of his first wife, Elvira, who died several years earlier. Only he can see or hear her, and his new wife, Ruth, is surprised when he suddenly starts having conversations with thin air. When he tries to convince her that Elvira has returned as a ghost, she refuses to believe him and thinks that he is going mad. The film then explores the ever-increasing complications arising from this situation.
When first released in 1945 the film was not a great success, much less successful than the play on which it was based. Today it is considered in some quarters to be a classic of the British cinema, but I have never really liked it very much. In this I am in good company. Coward himself thought that the film-makers had ruined his play, and its star, Rex Harrison, also disliked it. He also fell out with Lean, who he felt had no sense of humour. Not having known Lean personally, I cannot say whether Harrison was right on that score, but comedy does not seem to have been Lean's forte. I have never seen "Hobson's Choice", but his romantic comedy "Summertime" has always struck me as visually attractive but emotionally flat.
The associate producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, thought that the film suffered from miscasting, and I would agree with him on this. He perceptively pointed out that "The point of the play is a middle-aged man well into his second marriage, having long ago put away the follies of his youth with his sexy first wife, and suddenly being 'woken up' by her reappearance as a ghost". Harrison at 37 was perhaps too young for Charles, and Kay Hammond at 36 too old for Elvira, who is supposed to have been dead for twelve years. Constance Cummings as the supposedly more homely and sensible second wife Ruth actually comes across as more attractive than Hammond, who is not helped by her ghostly make-up which gives her a greenish tinge.
The best acting probably comes from Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati. Her name makes her sound foreign, but Rutherford plays her as a delightfully eccentric elderly Englishwoman, of the sort which Rutherford seemed to specialise in. (She was later to become a famous Miss Marple). She would only have been in her early fifties in 1945, but seems considerably older.
In his next film, "Brief Encounter", Lean was to reveal himself as a masterly director, but his skill is not so much in evidence here. Harrison was right when he called the film "unimaginative and flat, a filmed stage play". The dialogue is often marked by Coward's characteristic wit, but I felt that there is something rather mean-spirited and misogynistic about the story's attitude to women, especially Elvira. Lean today is regarded as a great director, and deservedly so, but I often wonder if "Blithe Spirit"' owes its supposed "classic" status more to the fact that it was directed by the man who went on to make the likes of "Great Expectations" and "Bridge on the River Kwai" than it does to its own merits. 5/10.
Indiscreet (1958)
The sort of thing people do in old movies, not the sort of thing they do in real life.
"Indiscreet" was the second film which Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant made together, the first being Alfred Hitchcock's "Notorious" from twelve years earlier. Whereas "Notorious" had been a spy thriller, "Indiscreet" is what might be called a middle-aged rom-com, Bergman being 43 in 1958 and Grant 54. Despite their advancing years, however, they were still attractive enough to be taken seriously as the hero and heroine of a romantic comedy. It was billed as Bergman's first comedy; it may have been her first English-language comedy, but she had made some in Sweden during the early part of her career in the thirties.
The action takes place in London. Bergman plays Anna Kalman, a famous stage actress, and Grant her boyfriend Philip Adams, an economist working for NATO. Anna's surname suggests that she is of Hungarian origin; Philip is supposed to be an American from San Francisco, but Grant's accent makes him sound English. Anna speaks with a continental accent, although her sister Margaret sounds very English. For a long time nothing much happens. Anna and Philip live the life of the well-to-do Beautiful People of fifties London, going to the ballet, the theatre and the best restaurants, and it is clear that they are in love. The one thing they cannot do, however, is marry; Philip gives Anna to understand that he is already married but separated and unable to get a divorce from his wife. (One thing that is never made clear is whether they have a sexual relationship. The moral climate of the fifties, and the strictures of the censors, made it difficult for film-makers to be too explicit about such matters).
The film's turning point comes when it is revealed that Philip is in fact unmarried. He has invented the story about his wife because he wants to make sure that Anna will not try and persuade him to marry. (He prefers to remain a bachelor). The rest of the film explores the complications arising from the exposure of Philip's lie.
This is the sort of film which in the fifties probably seemed very daring, but which today just goes across as very arch and contrived. It also seems very unrealistic; I suspect that iAnna would have wanted to know more about Philip's supposed "wife"- she never asks him anything about his marriage- and that she would have been been furious when she discovers that she has been lied to, especially as Philip never has the courage to admit to his lie. (Anna finds out from her sister, who has found out from her husband). Instead, she just comes up with a scheme to try and make Philip jealous by flirting with an old flame, a scheme I could never take seriously. It is the sort of thing people do in well-mannered old plays and movies, not the sort of thing they do in real life. Like a number of other plot developments in this film.
Bergman's relative inexperience in comedy shows, and she never really seems comfortable. Grant, more practised in such matters, is better, but in neither case is this one of their better films. 5/10.
A Passion for Churches (1974)
Not a Second "Metro-land"
I have an interest to declare. Sir John Betjeman was a cousin of mine. Admittedly, he was not a first cousin, but a distant cousin of my grandfather, and I never actually met him. He is, however, about the only celebrity I can claim as a kinsman, so I have always felt an interest in him. Another thing we have in common is a passion for churches, dating back to our childhoods. In this film Betjeman attributes his passion to an incident in which his father pointed out the tower of St Peter's church, Belaugh, Norfolk, during a family holiday. I cannot date my passion to anything quite so specific, but I would say that it dates back to around the time in the seventies when this programme was being shown, and my own father (a keen church explorer himself) and family holidays doubtless had a lot to do with it.
"A Passion for Churches" was intended as a follow-up to Betjeman's earlier documentary "Metro-land" from the previous year, in which he explored the world of North London suburbia. Edward Mirzoeff, who had produced and directed "Metro-land", began looking for a subject for another documentary he could make with the poet, and settled on churches because they are a frequent theme in Betjeman's poetry. All the churches shown here are in the Anglican Diocese of Norwich, which covers most of Norfolk and a small part of Suffolk. The area may have been chosen because of Betjeman's childhood experience, but also because East Anglia, the most densely populated part of England in the Middle Ages, is particularly rich in mediaeval churches.
For the most part Betjeman does not concentrate on his great enthusiasm, church architecture, probably because he realised that this subject would be of limited interest to the majority of his audience. His main focus is rather on various services and other events taking place in the churches of Norfolk- a baptism, a wedding, a Sunday school, bell-ringing, a Mothers' Union meeting, a pilgrimage to Walsingham, and so on. (The groom at the wedding, Nigel McCulloch, was himself a clergyman, and later became a bishop). There are also sections dealing with clergymen with unusual missions, such as the Chaplain of the Missions to Seamen, Great Yarmouth, shown visiting a lightship, and with redundant churches. The film ends with shots of people around the country going to their churches for the Easter Sunday services.
Despite Betjeman's obvious enthusiasm for his subject, however, "A Passion for Churches" has never really taken on the status of a classic piece of television in the same way as "Metro-Land" has. Betjeman's biographer A. N. Wilson said of the latter that it was "too good to be described simply as a programme"; it can be described as a poetic meditation on what might not normally be though of as a poetic subject, life in twentieth-century suburbia, a subject which in anyone else's hands would probably not have interested me very much. "A Passion for Churches", by contrast, combines two subjects of great interest to me- churches and Betjeman's poetry- but I suspect that anyone who does not share my enthusiasm for these matters will not find a lot to enjoy here. 7/10.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)
The Snows of Zanuck
Ernest Hemingway's novels have not always translated well to the cinema screen; the Rock Hudson/Jennifer Jones version of "A Farewell to Arms", for example, is a monument of tedium, and the Gary Cooper/Ingrid Bergman "For Whom the Bell Tolls", although rather better, is nevertheless overlong. Howard Hawks' version of "To Have and Have Not", with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is a pretty decent film, but that may be because Hawks largely ignored Hemingway's plot, turning his film into an unacknowledged remake of "Casablanca".
A big-game hunter named Harry Street, on safari in Kenya, lies in his camp at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, seriously ill with an infected wound to his leg, while his wife, Helen, and his African servants do their best to care for him. Harry believes that he is dying, and spends his time recalling his memories of the past. Like his creator, Hemingway, Harry is many things other than a big-game hunter. He is also a journalist and novelist, a lover of Paris, an aficionado of bullfighting and a former volunteer for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.
As he lies there, Harry's thoughts turn to his first wife, Cynthia, who was the great love of his life, even though she left him for a Spanish flamenco dancer. After that Harry had a romance with Elizabeth, a European countess whom he met in France, but she broke off their engagement when she realised that, in his heart, he was still in love with Cynthia. Harry and Cynthia were reunited in Spain, during the Civil War, but she was killed soon afterwards, and he returned to Paris, where he met Helen, whom he married largely because she reminded him strongly of Cynthia. (I have never thought of the brunette Ava Gardner and the red-headed Susan Hayward as lookalikes, but the make-up department seem to have done a good job in making them resemble one another). Another important influence on Harry's life was his Uncle Bill, who acted as his mentor and introduced him to hunting. (Bill, to judge from his accent, is clearly an Englishman, even though Harry is equally clearly an American).
Gregory Peck was not the studio's first choice for Harry; various other actors, including Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando were considered. I am not sure that Peck was the right choice. He was generally at his best playing thoughtful, rational characters in films like "The Big Country" and "To Kill a Mockingbird"; even in "The Gunfighter" his character, Jimmy Ringo, is essentially a thoughtful, rational gunfighter who has come to realise that his violent way of life is wrong and has determined to give it up. Here he faces the difficult task of trying to get us to sympathise with a man addicted to bullfighting and big-game hunting, sports which I (and doubtless many other people) have always found morally repellent on animal welfare grounds (and also conservationist grounds in the latter case). I felt that someone like Bogart might have been better at portraying a rumbustious, emotionally conflicted man of action which I think is what Harry is intended to be.
I have never read Hemingway's story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro", but I understand that its plot differs considerably from that of this film. Cynthia, probably the most important character in the film other than Harry himself, does not appear in the story, and the ending is not the one that Hemingway wrote. (Hemingway is said to have disliked it and to have called it "The Snows of Zanuck" after the producer). I think that the main problem with the film is its episodic structure, attempting to cram too much material (essentially the entire story of one man's life) into one film, and not having sufficient running-time to deal with all its episodes, especially those dealing with the Harry/Cynthia relationship, in sufficient detail.
The film is visually attractive, especially the shots of the African scenery. It was nominated for two Oscars, for Best Cinematography, Colour and Best Art Direction, Colour. (The print I saw on British television was rather faded, but I have found much better versions online). It did well at the box office in 1952, and was popular with the critics at the time, but has not held up all that well and today seems rather dated. 6/10.
Doctor Who: The Watcher (1965)
The Billy Bunter of the Time Lords
"The Time Meddler" is the ninth and final serial of the second season of "Doctor Who". The second is the best-preserved of all the early seasons of the programme. Only two episodes are currently missing, both from "The Crusade", meaning that eight out of the nine serials exist in a complete form. By contrast, thanks to the Beeb's policy of committing cultural vandalism by wiping old videotapes, not a single serial from the fourth season is currently complete.
The First Doctor and his companions Vicki and Steven Taylor arrive on the coast of Northumbria in 1066, just before the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Steven, played by the future "Blue Peter" presenter Peter Purves, was introduced in the previous serial, "The Chase", but this is his first adventure as a fully-fledged member of the crew of the TARDIS. He is perfectly prepared to accept the TARDIS as a spaceship, but is at first highly sceptical of the Doctor's claim that it can also travel in time. The travellers make contact with the local villagers and with a monk from a monastery on the clifftops. There are, however, some strange things about this individual; the Doctor's suspicions are aroused when he discovers that the Monk wears a wristwatch and owns a gramophone.
And, of course, the Monk is not a monk. (I do, however, refer to him as "the Monk" as this is what he is called in the cast list). He is a time traveller from the same planet as the Doctor. In retrospect we would call him a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, but in 1965 these terms had not yet been introduced into the series. (The expression "Time Lord" was first used in 1969, and the name "Gallifrey" in 1973). He is plotting to change the course of history by ensuring that King Harold wins the Battle of Hastings. It falls to the Doctor and his companions to thwart this dastardly plan.
This marks a change in the programme's attitude towards altering the course of history. In the first season, when the idealistic Barbara attempts to change history by firstly (in "The Aztecs") persuading the Aztecs to abandon human sacrifice and secondly (in "The Reign of Terror") by preventing the rise of Napoleon, the Doctor is unconcerned, believing that all attempts to change history are futile. In "The Time Meddler", however, the Doctor takes the view that it is quite possible for a time traveller to alter the course of history, but only the most irresponsible would try to do such a thing. Hence his anger when he discovers the Monk's plans and his determination to outwit him.
This was also the first "Doctor Who" serial to combine a historical setting with science-fiction themes. Previously there had been a divide between "scientific" and "historical" serials; in the latter, such as "The Aztecs", "The Reign of Terror" and "The Romans", the only sci-fi element was the use of time travel to arrive in a particular historical period at the beginning of the story and to depart from it at the end.
The concept of a renegade Time Lord would later be reintroduced into the series in the form of the Third Doctor's enemy, the Master. Peter Butterworth's Monk, however, is very different from Roger Delgado's Master. The Master was a sinister figure whose nefarious schemes were motivated by evil self-interest. The Monk claims idealistic motives- he states that if Harold wins the battle this will greatly accelerate the progress of European civilisation, leading to the invention of aircraft by the year 1320- but it becomes clear that he really just enjoys meddling with time for sheer devilment. The scriptwriter Dennis Spooner described him as a "schoolboy prankster from the Billy Bunter books", and "mischievous, sly and cunning with a 'naughty boy' look", and this is certainly how Butterworth plays him.
The Time Meddler was produced at on a low budget, even by the normally parsimonious standards of "Doctor Who", to offset the expense which had been incurred in making the two previous serials, "The Web Planet" and "The Chase". There is, for example, no attempt to recreate the battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings. Despite this, however, I enjoyed the serial a lot more than its two predecessors. Butterworth's performance as the Billy Bunter of the Time Lords is one of the most enjoyable things about this serial, as is the way in which Hartnell (not always my favourite Doctor) rises to the challenge of opposing him, becoming the champion of intergalactic law and authority against the Monk's wild anarchism. Spooner's script is an entertaining one, Maureen O'Brien's Vicki continues to grow after an uncertain start, and Purves's Steven is a welcome addition to the cast. A fitting end to the season. 7/10.
Nothing Sacred (1937)
No great work was ever produced by a committee
Like "His Girl Friday" from 1940, "Nothing Sacred" is a screwball romantic comedy which also satirises the American newspaper industry. Wally Cook is a New York journalist who gets into trouble with his editor Oliver Stone after being taken in by a hoax story. (Wally's newspaper is called the "Morning Star", a name which would later be borrowed by the British Communist Party for their official organ. In 1937, however, that newspaper was still known as the "Daily Worker").
Trying to get back into Stone's good books, Wally uncovers a story about Hazel Flagg, a young woman from Vermont who is supposedly dying of radium poisoning. Wally brings Hazel to New York and she becomes a celebrity, regarded as an inspiration to many because of her cheerful stoicism in the face of impending death. The truth, however, is that Hazel, unknown to Wally, has been the victim of a misdiagnosis and is, in fact, perfectly healthy. Hazel herself is well aware of this fact, but does not enlighten Wally (or anyone else) because she is having a great time in New York and is only too glad to get away from Warsaw, the dull little Vermont town where she has spent her whole life. (Warsaw, Vermont, is a fictitious place). Complications ensue when Wally and Hazel fall in love, and further ones when Stone discovers that Hazel is not in fact dying.
One might think that he would be relieved at this news, but he is in fact aghast; it is his newspaper which has built her up into a celebrity and any revelation of the truth could potentially be damaging to his reputation. As in "His Girl Friday" there is a strong suggestion that American journalists are less concerned with the truth than they are with concocting sensational stories to boost their papers' circulation. There is also some satire at the expense of American small-town life.
Ben Hecht (also the co-author of the play on which "His Girl Friday" was based) was officially credited with the screenplay, although he was sacked from the film following a row over casting with produced by David O. Selznick. (Hecht had written a part for his friend John Barrymore, but Selznick, who disliked Barrymore because of his heavy drinking, refused to use him). As a result various other writers were called in to finish the script; as many as eight different people have been suggested as having made contributions. They say that no great work of art was ever produced by a committee, so it is perhaps not surprising that the dialogue is not as sparkling and witty as that in "His Girl Friday".
At around an hour and a quarter the film was surprisingly short for a main feature, even by the standards of the thirties, and it might have benefitted from a longer running time to explore the various complications of the script. Perhaps Selznick, having lost his main writer, just wanted to wrap the whole thing up as quickly as possible.
The film was, unusually, filmed in colour, something of an expensive luxury in 1937. Monochrome tended to be the default position for screwball comedy, and this is the sort of filmed theatre which would have worked just as well in black-and-white.
Carole Lombard and Fredric March play their parts well enough, as does Walter Connolly as the blustering Stone, and this is an amiable little film. It is not, however, a classic like "His Girl Friday" or some of the other great screwballs such as "The Philadelphia Story" or "Bringing Up Baby". 7/10.
Look at Life: Loads for Roads (1966)
The past, as they say, is another country.
"Look at Life" was a series of short documentary films made between 1959 and 1969 by the Rank Organisation for screening in cinemas as "fillers" between the A and B feature films. Over 500 were produced, mostly concerning some aspect of life in Britain, although some dealt with other countries. They were normally around 8 minutes long and featured a voice-over by an invisible narrator (often the actor Tim Turner).
"Loads for Roads" was made in 1966 and takes a look at the shift from Britain's railways to the road system for carrying heavy loads. Oddly enough, the film does not mention one of the main causes of this shift, the "Beeching Axe" a programme of railway closures, involving closing some 5,000 miles of track and over 2,000 stations, which had taken place a few years before this film was made. This programme had been pushed through by the Chairman of British Rail, Dr Richard Beeching, aided and abetted by the notoriously pro-road and anti-rail Conservative Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples (who had formerly been a director of a road construction company). By 1966 the Labour Party were in power, but although they had opposed the Axe when in opposition, they did nothing to reverse it when in government, and even pushed through further closures of their own. The film-makers, however, would have needed the cooperation of British Rail to make this film, and possibly did not want to antagonise them by criticising their policies.
In the mid-sixties the British road system was not really developed enough to support a major shift from rail to road transport. The country's motorway network was still very fragmentary, and progress in constructing it was slow; we see a load of concrete girders being transported for use in the new M4 motorway, joining London to South Wales, but this motorway was not completed until 1980. Many towns still did not have bypasses. This meant that heavy, slow-moving loads had to travel along single-carriageway roads, passing through towns and villages, inevitably causing congestion and horrendous tail-backs behind them. This is well illustrated by the first load we see, a special "road train", operated by a crew of five men, carrying a massive electric generator from southern England to Scotland, a journey of some 400 miles. As the "road train" could only travel at 10 miles per hour, the journey would take several days. The sorts of problems such a trip could cause can only be imagined.
Such journeys could only be undertaken with a special licence from the Minister of Transport, which was not always automatically granted. The M4 girders, for example, had to be transported by rail for most of their journey, although even these had to go by road for the last few miles from the station to the site where they were needed.
Films like this are, I suspect, of greater interest today than they were when first made. In 1966 this film probably was not telling most people- certainly not most motorists- anything very new. Today, however, they are of great interest to the social historian, showing how different things were a few decades ago. The past, as they say, is another country.
In Old Oklahoma (1943)
A Film of Two Halves
How many years must pass before an area can be referred to as "old" in a historical movie. I doubt if anyone today would use the format "In Old (add name of state here)" for a film set during the late 1980s, but in 1943 it evidently seemed quite reasonable to call a film"In Old Oklahoma", even though it is set as recently as 1906, less than forty years previously. I think that the reason is that the differences between the Oklahoma of 1943 and the Oklahoma of 1906 were very great, much greater than the differences between any American state in 2024 and the same state in 1987. In 1906 Oklahoma, not yet a state in its own right but still Indian territory, was perhaps the last surviving part of the Wild West, although it was changing fast after oil was discovered there.
The film is also known as "War of the Wildcats", and was billed under this title when I saw it on British television. "Wildcat" at this period was a term for an oil prospector, and the "wildcats" of the title are wealthy oil baron Jim Gardner and a cowboy named Dan Somers who works for him. There are two phases to their "war". In the first half of the film their rivalry is purely romantic as both men are interested in a young schoolteacher-turned-novelist named Catherine Allen. In the second half their rivalry becomes commercial, as Dan realises that Jim's business ethics are virtually non-existent and sets up in business himself. (Dan, like a lot of characters played by John Wayne, is a bit of a rough diamond, but essentially honest and decent).
Oil has been discovered on an Indian reservation, and Dan wins the contract to drill for it by paying the tribe a much more generous price than Jim was prepared to offer. A term of the contract, however, requires that Dan must deliver 10,000 barrels to Tulsa by the end of August- and Jim, who controls the pipeline, refuses to allow Dan to use it. The film ends with a crazy race to get the oil to Tulsa before the deadline, using rickety wooden horse-drawn tankers- with Jim and his henchmen doing their best to sabotage them. By now Catherine, who was initially prepared to defend Jim as a go-ahead modern businessman, has realised what a heel the man is, and has thrown her lot in with Dan. Inevitably, the two fall in love.
The first half seems like something out of a rather dull romantic comedy. The second half is a lot better, especially the depiction of the Great Oil Race, although I felt that these scenes could have benefitted from having a lot more money spent on them than Republic Pictures, always one of the more cash-strapped Hollywood studios, could afford. (Even so, the film cost more than most of Republic's productions). The film might also have been better if it had been in colour to export the spectacular Western scenery, and probably would have been had it been made a few years later, but in 1943 colour was an expensive luxury. Even so, this is not a bad film. I considered switching it off around halfway through. I'm glad I didn't. 6/10.
The Departed (2006)
No Honour Among Thieves
In 1976 the Academy gave the Best Picture Oscar to "Rocky" rather than "Taxi Driver". In 1983 they totally ignored "The King of Comedy"- and that was the year in which the Oscars were dominated by "Terms of Endearment", possibly the worst ever Best Picture. In 2004 they went with "Million Dollar Baby" rather than "The Aviator". So just what did the Academy have against Martin Scorsese, possibly the greatest director of his generation? OK, I could live with, say, "Dances with Wolves" beating "Goodfellas", but why were some of his greatest films overlooked in favour of what I saw as weaker competitors? 2006 was the year when the Academy tried to make amends, giving Scorsese his first Best Picture and Best Director wins.
Like "Mean Streets" and "Goodfellas" "The Departed" is a gangster crime drama. The action takes place in Boston. I won't set out the complicated plot in full, but it revolves around the fact that the Massachusetts State Police are trying to infiltrate the Irish-American crime gang led by Frank Costello, while at the same time Costello is trying to infiltrate the police. Billy Costigan, a recent recruit to Costello's gang, is really an undercover state trooper, whereas trooper Colin Sullivan is secretly acting as Costello's spy within the police. Both the police and Costello suspect that they may have been infiltrated, so both Costigan and Sullivan are instructed to discover the identity of the other side's "mole". A complicating factor is that both Costigan and Sullivan are involved with the same woman, psychiatrist Madolyn Madden. The significance of the title is that many of the leading characters will end up dead.
One of Scorsese's strengths is his ability to elicit great performances from his actors. This was his third collaboration with Leonardo di Caprio after "Gangs of New York" and "The Aviator"; they were later to work together on "Shutter Island", "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "Killers of the Flower Moon". I must admit that I was not di Caprio's greatest admirer during the nineties when he seemed like a lightweight pretty-boy in films like "Titanic" or "Romeo and Juliet", but was a lot better in "Catch Me If You Can", and in "The Aviator" he showed that he had the potential to be a great actor. In "The Departed" his development as an actor continued. Here he is excellent as Costigan, a man torn between on the one hand his desire to see criminals brought to justice and on the other his fears for his personal safety should his secret ever be discovered. He also has a sense of divided loyalties, because he grew up in the same area of South Boston where Costello's gang is based, and knew some of the gangsters personally in his youth. (Which, of course, explains why he is able to infiltrate the gang; they would never have accepted someone who did not grow up in that particular milieu).
Scorsese wanted another of his regular stars, Robert de Niro, as Costello, but he turned the role down in order to direct "The Good Shepherd". Ray Liotta, the star of "Goodfellas", was also unavailable, and the part instead went to an actor not normally associated with Scorsese, Jack Nicholson. Nicholson gives another titanic performance, similar in my view to the one he gave as Colonel Nathan Jessup in "A Few Good Men". Like Jessup, Costello has a nasty streak of uncontrolled anger and aggression just below the surface, hidden in Jessup's case by an air of calm authority and in Costello's by a false sense of friendliness and avuncularity. He treats both Sullivan and Costigan as a favourite nephew, but we are left in little doubt that he is at heart a ruthless thug. He does not even subscribe to a code of "honour among thieves"; we learn that he is secretly an FBI informant and therefore enjoys a certain level of immunity for his crimes. (He is said to have been based upon the real-life gangster Whitey Bulger).
Other good performances come from Matt Damon as the treacherous Sullivan, Martin Sheen as Costigan's superior Captain Queenan and Alec Baldwin as another senior officer. Rather surprisingly, the film received only one acting Oscar nomination, for Mark Wahlberg as Queenan's assistant Sergeant Dignam.
"The Departed" is an excellent crime thriller with some great acting, a film which asks some very pertinent questions, not just about crime but also about about loyalty, betrayal, identity, friendship and the ethics of law enforcement. As in "Goodfellas", Scorsese avoids the trap (a common one in Hollywood ever since "The Godfather") of glamourising or mythologising gangsterdom. So how do I feel about the Academy's belated honouring of my hero after overlooking him for so long? Well, of course I am relieved, but paradoxically I would not have given "Best Picture" to this film. Yes, "The Departed" is a good film, but in my opinion Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" is a better one. 8/10.
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Film-Making on the Grand Scale
After making "Summertime" in 1955, David Lean's career was to undergo a surprising change. In the remaining three decades of his career he was only to make five more feature films, all of which were to be epics on a grand scale dealing with some aspect of modern history. "Doctor Zhivago" was the third of these after "Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Lawrence of Arabia".
After it was published in 1957, Boris Pasternak's novel was highly popular in the West, even though it was banned in the Soviet Union where it was seen as anti-Communist. It tells the story of the title character, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and his affair with a woman named Lara Antipova, even though both are married, he to his cousin Tonya and she to the revolutionary Pavel "Pasha" Antipov. The story of their romance is told against the background of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War, and the film is madd in the grand epic style which was becoming Lean's trademark. Even though Pasternak had died since publication of the novel, the Soviet authorities' attitude towards him remained hostile, making filming in Russia itself impossible, so it was mostly shot in Spain or Finland.
The two leads, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, are adequate, but not a lot more, and nether is the best thing about the film. (Christie was better in "Darling", another film from 1965 for which she won a "Best Actress" Oscar, and was to be better in another historical epic, "Far from the Madding Crowd", a couple of years later). Pasternak's novel (as is common with Russian novels) is a very complex one with a big cast of characters, and this is one of those films where some of the supporting cast are more interesting than the leads. I was particularly impressed by Tom Courtenay as Pasha. (As were the Academy; he received the film's only acting Oscar nomination). He starts the film as an idealistic but peaceful young radical, opposed to both the Tsarist regime and to the Bolsheviks, whom he sees as too violent. Later, however, he becomes harder and fanatical, willing to embrace the revolutionary violence he once condemned, and leads a pro-Bolshevik military unit during the civil war. Others who impressed me included Alec Guinness as Zhivago's brother Yevgraf, a convicted Communist but a relatively humane one, and Rod Steiger as the corrupt and debauched businessman Victor Komarovsky who later throws in his lot with the triumphant Bolsheviks.
The film was a great success at the box office; even today it remains in the list of the ten top-grossing films when adjusted for inflation. It was not, however, the highest grossing film of 1965; that honour went to "The Sound of Music". Both films were nominated for ten Oscars, and both won five, but it was "The Sound of Music" which took the top honours of "Best Picture"and "Best Director". Despite its popular success, the movie was not always well liked by the critics. The most common criticisms were that at over three hours it was overlong, that it was not always faithful to Pasternak's novel and that by concentrating on the love story it trivialised or romanticised the history of the Russian Revolution.
These three criticisms are essentially linked; indeed, I think that the first two cancel each other out, and the reason lies in the complexity of the novel which I have already alluded to. Yes, it would have been possible to make the film shorter, but only at the expense of faithfulness to its source. Yes, it would have been possible to have made the film more faithful, but only by making it considerably longer. And nobody would really have wanted to see a five or six hour epic. And in editing the novel for filming, screenwriter Robert Bolt naturally concentrated upon the easiest parts to film, rather than the complicated political background. The resulting film is none the worse for being a love story set against the background of war and revolution rather than a docu-drama about Russian political history in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Of Lean's Big Five epics, it is a long time since I last saw either "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Ryan's Daughter", so I will not compare "Doctor Zhivago" with those. I would not rank it quite as highly as "Bridge on the River Kwai", probably Lean's greatest film along with his two Dickens adaptations. I would, however, rank it above his last film, "A Passage to India". E. M. Forster's novel, more concerned with personal relationships than with great historical developments, was not really suited to the epic style, and that film might have benefited from a more intimate touch.
Pasternak's novel, however, does deal with great historical developments, and in my view is admirably suited to the epic sweep which Lean brings to it here. There are grand set-pieces like the battle scenes and the Tsarist troopers savagely riding a peaceful demonstration led by Antipov. Although the film was not actually shot in Russia, its look calls to mind the wide-open spaces of that country. The film's emotional impact is heightened by the Maurice Jarre's evocative musical score which makes use of the balalaika, an instrument which plays a part in the plot. This is a fine example of film-making on the grand scale. 8/10
Some goofs. At one point Yevgraf Zhivago tells Tonya Komarova, who he believes to be his niece, that a book of poems "by Y A Zhivago" is not by him but by his brother, Yuri. In Russian the names Yevgraf and Yuri would be written with different initial letters, so such an explanation would not be necessary. Tonya believes that she is Komarovsky's daughter- in which case her surname would be Komarovskaya, not Komarova.